ABSTRACT
Drawing on our own and others’ research we suggest that that there is evidence to support the view that, with teachers’ guidance, working and talking together can provide a powerful support for children’s cognitive development and learning. However, the evidence also shows that much of the talk in collaborative activity in classrooms is unproductive – with children working everywhere in groups but rarely as groups, and with teachers often seemingly unaware of how to maximize the quality of children’s collaborative work. Arguing that there is a need to explicitly induct children into ways of talking and working together, we highlight work from our ongoing programme of classroom-based research explicitly designed to enhance the quality of children’s talk and joint activity. Most of our research has been with the primary (8-11 years) age group, and so we will draw on examples and evidence accordingly. We show how a well-designed programme of language-based classroom activities can make an important contribution to the development not only of children’s language and communication skills, but also to their reasoning and learning.
